Author Archives

Contact The Cresset

Contact us at the above email address to submit Letters to the Editor or for concerns related to current subscriptions, including address corrections, missed-issue notifications, and all other communications regarding current subscriptions.

More information

Mission Statement

The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

A Publication of:

Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics
in the Book of Revelation offers a new look at the Book of
Revelation from the perspective of Elaine Pagels, best known for her work with
the Nag Hammadi Library—the collection of so-called “Gnostic Gospels.” The
Gnostic Gospels are a series of codices (little books) found in Egypt in 1945,
dated from the third and fourth centuries. These texts are called “Gnostic”
partially for their hidden spiritual meaning, or gnosis, but also after
the sect that gave birth to them, the Gnostics. Several earlier
Christian leaders including Irenaeus and Tertullian attacked the Gnostic
movement, branding it heretical because its adherents expressed views at odds
with the acceptable doctrines of the Christian Church.

If
you do not own a translation of the Gnostic Gospels and have always been
curious about them, Revelations is an easy way to gain some exposure.
The book takes a polemical tone describing how religious authorities have used
the Book of Revelation as a tool to thwart the Gnostic movement since it first
emerged. Pagels, in fact, questions whether the book ever should have been
included in the Bible at all and states that it was not the product of an
Apostle. She posits that the defenders of early Christian orthodoxy invented
the idea that John, the beloved disciple of Jesus and witness to the
crucifixion and resurrection, wrote the Apocalypse. She holds that the real
author was another John, a frustrated Jewish prophet/writer of no reputation
who, shortly after the Roman war, was bent on lashing out at the Romans and
Gentile converts of Paul of Tarsus.

If
you are a little rusty on your church history, Revelations will either
confuse or delight, depending on your orientation to and appreciation for traditional
Christian thought. The Church considers the Gnostic Gospels apocryphal (of
doubtful authenticity) since they are pseudepigraphical (ascribed to authors
who did not actually write them). Pagels asserts that defenders of orthodoxy
had political reasons for stomping out the Gnostic cause, but fails to mention
the real reasons why they did so. The early Church rejected Gnostic views not
so much because the early Church Fathers were rigid about establishing
orthodoxy (although they certainly were), but because the Gnostics did not
believe in Jesus’ divinity or physical resurrection. Gnostic writings of the
third and fourth centuries were frowned upon because they did not meet the
minimum requirement of ­apostolic authority and authorship and also because
they contradicted other works (biblical ones) that did. Bear in mind as you
read Pagels’s book, when she says Revelation(s), she means the Gnostic
ones and when she says Revelation (no s), she means the biblical
one. In an effort to put Revelations on par with Revelation and to level the
playing field for the Gnostics, she challenges the Revelation in two ways: 1)
She calls into doubt the book’s apostolic authorship, and; 2) She criticizes
its inclusion in the New Testament canon.

Most
scholars, including Pagels, believe that the Book of Revelation was written
around 95 ad near the time of the
Roman Emperor Domitian’s death. She tells a story of how her John turns
up in Ephesus to distribute his book of propaganda after a brief exile on the
Isle of Patmos. Once back on the mainland, John of Patmos goes to work sending
his prophecy to the seven churches in Asia Minor, namely Ephesus, Smyrna,
Thyatira, Laodicea, Pergamon, Sardis, and Philadelphia.

This
story is not unlike the traditional version featuring John the Apostle. He too
was exiled to Patmos and at the death of Domitian returned to Ephesus, where
the Christian Church had re-established itself after being driven from
Jerusalem. The seven churches were all in a circular route from Ephesus,
relatively near one another. Christians believe John the Apostle started these
churches himself and was regarded with reverence and affection by their
bishops. They believe this because the Book of Revelation was read in those
churches immediately after it was circulated, and there exists testimony from
some of the bishops of those churches as early as the beginning of the second
century. It is difficult to imagine Pagels’s John of Patmos, furious with Rome
and Gentile converts, gaining traction in the seven churches. Since they knew
nothing of him and his prophecies, it is more likely he would have offended
their congregations than delighted them. A sweep of all seven is hard to
fathom. It is not so hard, on the other hand, to imagine the Apostle gaining
immediate traction in those churches led by bishops he had put into place
before his exile.

At
four different places, the Book of Revelation claims to be written by “John.”
The author speaks with authority in chapters two and three to the bishops
of the seven churches, starting with Ephesus. The author has thorough knowledge
of what is going on in each of these churches as he comments on their strengths
and weaknesses in minute detail. That this John was the famous Apostlecomes
from an early, reliable source—Irenaeus, who was a native of Asia Minor living
near Smyrna where Polycarp, one of the three principal Apostolic Fathers, was
bishop. Polycarp converted to Christianity by means of direct interaction with
the apostles of Christ. He personally knew and communicated with many who had
seen and heard Jesus. Polycarp knew John the Apostle, according to Irenaeus who
called Polycarp a disciple of the Apostle. Irenaeus did not know the Apostle,
but did know Polycarp. Irenaeus quotes from the Revelation again and again in
his works as the product of the Apostle.

An
Ephesian contemporary of Polycarp, Papias, attests to the book’s inspiration,
which implies that he knew it was apostolic. In one of the fragments of his
works, Papias seems to refer to two distinct and separate Johns in Ephesus at
the time:

I would inquire for the sayings of the Presbyters, what
Andrew said, or what Peter said, or what Philip or what Thomas or James or what
John or Matthew or any other of the Lord’s disciples, and for the things which
other of the Lord’s disciples, and for the things which Aristion and the
Presbyter John, the disciples of the Lord, were saying.

The
possible reference to a second John in this fragment is where the conspiracy
theories of another John originate, theories that Pagels takes to a whole new
level. The fact that there are two separate tombs in Ephesus bearing the name
of John adds fuel to the fire, but a careful reading of the fragment is not
definitive. Papias could have been referring to the same John in two different
ways and, regardless of the rendering, he did not attribute authorship to
either. No one made much of this until the fourth century when ­writers were
looking for ways to soften the Christian message after the Romans legalized the
religion under Constantine.

Pagels
contends that the earliest testimonies of apostolic authorship were
manufactured. She accuses Irenaeus and Justin Martyr of making the whole thing
up: “when critics charged that a heretic had written it, its earliest defenders
sought to lend it legitimacy by insisting that Jesus’ own disciple John wrote
its prophesies” (2). It is particularly distasteful that she would accuse the
early Church Fathers of making up apostolic authorship when she herself offers
no evidence whatsoever that any such John of Patmos ever lived.

Pagels
also tells us that the early Christians panned the book and few ever paid
attention to it. She writes: “Ever since it was written, Christians have argued
for and against it especially from the second century to the fourth, when it
barely squeezed into the canon to become the final book of the New Testament”
(2). Again, the facts seem to point in the opposite direction. There were very
few, mostly anonymous, detractors of the book until 247 ad, when Dionysius of Alexandria built a case that the
Apostle could not have written it. Dionysius noted what he believed were
stylistic differences between the Book of Revelation and the Gospel of John and
John’s Epistles. He felt it odd that John mentioned his own name in the
Revelation, whereas he never did so in the other works of his hand. Scholars
since have debated the stylistic differences, which do seem to exist, but the
most obvious answer for this is that John wrote down the vision exactly as it
unfolded on Patmos. Pagels believes, rather, that John of Patmos contrived the
book for political reasons and that the style he used (“wartime literature” she
calls it) was a method intended to put forward certain coded, political
messages (7). Dionysius himself believed the work to be inspired, as Pagels
notes, but not authored by the Apostle.

Perhaps
Dionysius did not give enough weight to the fact that the author was exiled to
the Roman mines under guard and saw these visions in a cave, probably without
much scribal help to record them. In Ephesus, where the Christian church
hierarchy had transferred many resources from Jerusalem after the war, there
was a cadre of Greek writers and scribes that could have worked with the text
once it was in their care, but exiled on Patmos John was on his own with at
most one scribe to assist him. Since he was told in the vision to write down
exactly what he saw (Rev. 1:19, 22:18,19), he may have insisted that changes
not be made to the raw text upon his return to Ephesus. Perhaps Dionysius
should have excused the fact that John’s Greek was not smoothed out for that
reason and acknowledged that he chose to drop the self-deprecating practice of
omitting his name from his own work because this was not his own work, but
rather Jesus’ own revelation. John likely identified himself because the
emperor had banished him from the land of the living and was unsure as to
whether he would survive. His job—as he probably saw it—was to get the vision
out to the seven churches at all cost. In the case of his untimely demise, it
would be more readily accepted if it bore the Apostle’s name. He calls himself
John because he is the Apostle writing to his own flock. He does not need to
identify himself further.

Another
source for Pagels is Eusebius, who in the fourth century picked up on the
reference to two Johns of Papias to put forward a theory that Presbyter Johnmay have actually penned the Book of Revelation, rather than the famous
Apostle. Even Eusebius wavers and at times implies that the book is apostolic.
It is ­conceivable that Eusebius, in his efforts to ­present the history of
Christianity at the onset of the Imperial Church in the best light, was simply
walking back the harshness of the Apocalypse in its apparent allusions to Rome.

A
reasonable conclusion to the objections raised in regard to the apostolic
authorship of the Book of Revelation by the time of Dionysius and Eusebius must
be that they are thin, late, and subjective. They were made long after the fact
and far removed from the region where the author lived and the work was
disseminated. The evidence for the Apostle having written it on the other hand,
is strong, objective, and found in sources dated at or near the time of the
writing, and in the region where it was written and distributed.

Turning
to Pagels’s second challenge, the canonization of the Book of Revelation, she
states that it was left off of many lists of canonical books until the time of
Constantine (161), which is not quite accurate. The book did not make it into
the New Testament, as she would have us believe, by hook or by crook, but
rather by the overwhelming consensus of the majority of councils, list makers,
and influential writers, including those who knew the Apostle and accepted the
Revelation as his work. The book was in the early canons from 170 to 400 ad including the Muratorian, Apostolic,
Athanasian, and Augustinian canons, and was accepted by councils in 325, 393,
397, and 419 ad. The first
council to reject it was the sixteenth council, the Laodicean Council,in
the middle-fourth century. Laodicea was spoken of very negatively in the
Revelation, as neither cold nor hot (Rev. 3:15), which may account for its
exclusion by them. It was restored by the very next council.

If
one can step outside the polemic, Pagels’s Revelations produces some
real gems, such as the analysis of the battle in heaven described in Revelation
as a recurring motif originating in Babylon (26). There are several such
diamonds in the rough, with tasty bits from the Gnostic Gospels themselves,
making this book worth reading. Finally, the book ends on a sweet note worthy
of concluding with: “Whether one sees in John’s visions the destruction of the
whole world or the dark tunnel that propels each of us toward our own death,
his final vision suggests that even after the worst we can imagine has
happened, we may find the astonishing gift of new life. Whether one shares that
conviction, few readers miss seeing how these visions offer consolation and
that most necessary of divine gifts—hope” (175). A

Don Davis received a BA from the University of Washington and
studied Church History and Ancient Greek at Fuller Theological Seminary before
receiving an MA in Religion from Liberty University and a PhD from
International Seminary. He lives with his wife on Bainbridge Island, just
outside Seattle, Washington.